Against the Grain

How many intersections can you cram in one feminist?

31 questions to ask me before you ask about what’s in my pants

Henry Giardina introduces part of “The Trans Experience” in an excellent post over on fourtwonine. In addition to signal boosting his post, I am going to answer his suggested 31 questions.

So here’s the crux of what he’s trying to convey: As fucking violent as transmisogyny and trans-antagonism are, some people’s sense of empathy doesn’t shatter upon contact with gender variant people. The problem is that in their bid to try and relate with a trans person, they ask a lot of invasive and really personal questions (which we sometimes try to answer anyways–see the comments section of his article).

Now I don’t want to antagonize efforts to humanize trans folk, but nor am I particularly interested in letting up on the privacy to which I am entitled. Thankfully, Giardina proposes many questions that do the trick of humanizing without me having to answer the frankly ludicrous question of “cock or pussy?”

1. What was the first time you remember feeling like you were doing something wrong by being you?

I knew from the strict, patriarchal confines of the masculine role assigned to me that donning make-up is treated a bit like taking a chainsaw to school. Nowadays I’m not super in to make-up, at least not all the time, but I can still distinctly remember a very intense duality, a shame that burned alongside a defiant rush, a little voice that told the world to fuck off because I definitely wasn’t going to stop here no matter how much it wanted me to. It was a bit of powder and paint but people acted like I wanted to play with matches.

2. Where did this guilt come from? (i.e. religion, community, social beliefs of parents, class expectations etc.)

It cannot be understated that this guilt was sourced from literally fucking everywhere. Advertising, TV, caregivers, parents, teachers, peers, pastors, neighbours, books. I went the first 19 years of my life not knowing the word “transgender” because the world never at any point wanted me to know that was an option. So every time I tried to voice this periodically crippling disconnect with my sense of self, I was inevitably met with a silence that said more than any screaming or cursing ever could.

3. When was the first time you realized it might be okay to be you?

About the same time I started to improve my mental health by limiting the amount of fucks I gave regarding other people’s opinions about me. Not transitioning or asserting my identity was something I only did to please everyone else. Once I stopped pleasing everyone else, the choice became obvious.

4. What was the reason for that?

In general I was beginning to be persuaded by a lot of movements and arguments that we currently call social justice. I noticed a lot of people didn’t know or didn’t care that these movements were doing good, incredible work, they were just buying in to the smear campaigns uncritically. To be a feminist was to be a bra-burning man hater. That opinion just seemed incompatible with what we were actually doing.

5. Describe the first friendship you made as ‘you’ (after you came out)

Kay, which isn’t her real name, but if she’s reading this she knows who I mean. She will always have a very dear place in my heart despite the difficulties we had in the latter portion of our relationship. She had a great sense of snark and could direct it to the numerous dipsticks that raised my ire. God damn did she know how to hug when I needed it. She saved me… which is too much damn pressure for someone who isn’t ready to rescue anyone. Not fair to either of us.

6. How did your friendships change once you came out (both friendships you made and friendships you’d had before)

Prior to transitioning I overcompensated on my personality to try and make up for my debilitating insecurity. After transitioning my confidence is less boisterous and more assertive. I’m probably less annoying.

7. Who disappointed you the most when you came out to them?

My friend D, also not his real name. We aren’t friends anymore. I kinda wonder why I kept him around considering years before my transition he legitimately tried to argue that homosexuality was bad because the Bible said so. That really should’ve been my first hint.

8. Who disappointed you the least?

My friend C. She responded in the exact correct way: “Okay.” She knew better than to transgress on my boundaries and allowed me to come to her if I needed any tutorials on femme stuff.

9. Who surprised you?

My Dad. I was devoured by the fear that he’d disown me. In reality, he caught up to speed faster than my mom. I think he’s one of my readers, too. Hi Dad. Thanks for having human decency. It’s in shockingly short supply lately.

10. Has your identification changed since you’ve come out?

Yes. I’m more comfortable with ambiguity now. I don’t need to fit in a box. There’s some squiggly-lines in my identity, and I am at peace with that.

11. What about your ideas about gender?

Of course I was indoctrinated into the cissexist belief system and much of my mental health improved when I disentangled that mess. I had a TERF phase during that process which thankfully wasn’t recorded.

12. When did you learn about trans history?

TransAdvocate does a lot of work on that. I got about as far back as 1970s during Janice Raymond’s campaign to have transition services removed from healthcare. She succeeded. I try not to think about how many trans folk died between then and now because of it.

13. Did someone tell you about it or did you seek it out yourself?

During one of my gender frustration rants a friend sat me down and asked me point blank. My kneejerk response was “No, of course I’m not trans.” A week later I phoned him to admit I’m totally trans.

14. What was the first violent event you associated with being trans (the first suicide you heard of, movie or tv show you watched, book you read)

The first trans support group I ever attended, the facilitator said he had an announcement to make about one of the regulars. One of the other women asked “who was it this time.”

This time.

And two more times since.

15. How did it affect you?

It generated a lot of resentment towards people who don’t know about the extent of the problem. You have cisgender academics howling brimstone and hellfire from the safety of their gilded towers, talking about gender variance as if it were a distant, alien theoretical. Meanwhile my community was getting stabbed in the street. Must be nice to have requests for gender-neutral pronouns be the most pressing issue in your life.

16. Who was the first trans person you met?

A group, so I don’t really have a single person to remember.

17. What was (is) your relationship?

They were a support community.

18. In your current life, do you have to tell people you’re trans?

“Have” to? No. But I have the privilege that I can disclose on a regular basis without too much worry, so I do.

19. If so, how does the relationship change afterward (if at all?)

With respects to dating, people get scarce quickly. I’m used to it. I think most people are a lot less likely to turn tail and run in other contexts.

20. If not, how does it affect you?

n/a

21. As a child, when and where did you feel the most safe?

Watching Veronica Mars. Mars was a powerful counter-example to the docile, meek femininity I so often saw depicted in other media. It helped me realize transitioning didn’t have to mean being polite or demure, that my ambition and my femininity as I understood it were not mutually exclusive.

22. As an adult, when and where do you feel the most safe?

…Watching Veronica Mars. I’m also trying to straighten out my money so I can go back to music lessons for this reason.

23. If you could have picked a perfect time to ‘come out’, when would it have been?

I came out without using those words at 6, 14, and 19. What would have been perfect is being believed the first time.

24. What was your first experience with suicide or a suicide attempt (your own, or someone else’s)?

I made a plan to jump off a very high bridge. Called the crisis line the moment I realized what I was planning, and have kept vigilant about suicidal ideation since. Every year or so someone from the support group doesn’t reach out for help, and we never see her again.

25. When was the first time you felt you had established a chosen family (if at all?)

This is going to be a bit sad but my abuser convinced me her & her web would be that chosen family. At the moment, I feel a bit like a stray.

26. When was the first time you felt someone really got you?

My relationship with Kay.

27. What was your first positive mental health experience (if any?)

Coming to terms with my gender identity did wonders all by itself.

28. What was the first representation of transness that you saw that made you angry?

A rape victim shared a post on Facebook about how including trans women in women’s spaces meant introducing rape threats in spaces she otherwise considered safe, which made me double angry because 50% of the people who’ve raped me were cis women.

29. What was the first representation of transness that you saw that left you feeling positive (if any?)

If we’re counting non-fiction, Janet Mock is the on point-est person ever.

30. Do you feel like you had a childhood?

Not really. I felt like my childhood was spent watching a tape projected onto a screen of someone else’s life.

31. What’s something you hope to do for a young trans person growing up that you wish someone had done for you?

Give you the vocabulary to name yourself. Had someone given me the word “transgender” at age six I would’ve started this shit a lot sooner.

-Shiv

Self care Saturday, Nov 5: Seeing the original metalhead live

Vivaldi’s Four Seasons is probably one of the more immediately recognizable pieces he ever wrote, with the Spring almost always garnering the “hey it’s that song!” response from anyone listening. But as we’ve mentioned before on this blag, my love of Vivaldi’s work stems from his metalhead pieces. While Spring is indeed beautiful and calming, I have the utmost admiration for Summer, which at its peak is played up to a blistering ~180 beats per minute with up to 4 notes per beat.

In fact, the song is so intense that when I went to see it live a week ago, the soloist shredded their fucking bow at the end of Summer’s final movement.

Vivaldi: Trashing his instruments before it was cool.

-Shiv

Debates, duels, and disagreements

Remember the Good Old Days when disagreements were settled with a duel? When disparagement of character could be challenged by the superior marksman, or swordsman, whichever the case may be? It coasted on a perverse sense of honour, predicated in the belief that the only reason one would put their life on the line to defend an idea is if they thought that idea was true enough to risk it.

The actual matter of accuracy or lack thereof, however, was not investigated by these duels. They may have proven that the idea–whatever the idea actually was–was important to the dueling participants. That’s it.

Debates are no different.

I can’t help but roll my eyes to near fatal degree when I hear debate proposals being positioned as acts of truth and discovery. They’re not. Just like the duels of yore, they simply illustrate that two people care enough about a topic to make a public spectacle of their disagreement, and in the absence of a corpse the “winner” is simply whoever the audience liked more–an attitude influenced no doubt by whether or not either speaker pandered to their pre-conceived ideas and prejudices.

After all, if debates were about discovery, the questions would focus on actual research findings, and not reductive buzz words inevitably miring us in the swamplands of linguistic nihilism. It’s not a demonstration of acuity or accuracy of belief. It’s a pissing contest to see whose stream reaches farther. It’s a format that rewards theatrics and melodrama, not logical structure or thoroughness of fact-checking.

So here’s a prediction: Jordan Peterson will win his debate. He will win his debate because suspicion of trans people is the activity du jour of hand-wringing reactionaries. His premises will not be accurate and his conclusions will not be valid, but it won’t matter. His detractors already know he’s full of shit and all the debate is likely to do is contribute to his weeks long gish gallop, his supporters will accept his flawed reasoning because transphobia is the Soup of the Day (but only as long as you call it free speech rather than transphobia). No one will learn much except for whether or not their disdain for one idea or another is represented by one of the parties present. His supporters, confirmed in their prejudice by a fancy academic (hey I guess those fuckin’ nerds are good for something, as long as they agree with me), will carry on with their lives heads firmly planted up their asses. The addresses and phone numbers of his detractors will remain on the internet forever. Fact and reason will fall by the wayside, buried ironically by a man who claims to wear the very concepts as his banner.

Nothing will change. Not from this debate. Not from any debate. Educators will carry on educating despite the ditches Peterson tries to dig for us.

-Shiv

Transition Reactions p12: Well, *I* don’t talk like that

We return to my personal experiences and so require the should-be-obvious disclaimer that I am not a spokeswoman for the entirety of trans folk.

So obviously I am preoccupied with the extent of trans-antagonism even here in Canada, where the government is finally tackling institutional discrimination by mandating nondiscrimination policies. But par for the course, a lot of people don’t understand what discrimination actually is, and think that if something is made illegal it “stops happening,” and now that it might be illegal to discriminate against trans folk in a few more months we can all go home and stop complaining.

What this attitude overlooks are two things: structural discrimination and personal discrimination. I’ll cover structural discrimination another time but even with personal discrimination there’s a fair bit going on.

It’s been criminal to discriminate against cisgender gay people for years, yet cis gay Canadians still exhibit lower socioeconomic outcomes compared to cisgender heterosexuals (“cis het”). Now if you’re the type of person I can’t speak to politely, you blame cis gays for this. Unfortunately for you, all evidence points to cis het folk still enacting–and getting away with–homo-antagonistic discrimination.

Which creates a problem if I try to talk about homo- and trans-antagonism. This is a problem that starts with the actions of cis het people. That means it is impossible in a thorough analysis not to, at some point, examine the role of the majority in the socioeconomic outcomes of the minority.

Which also means, at some point, I have to talk about you. Yes, you, even the ones who take the time to read a trans voice (I’ve recommended many, hopefully I’m not the only one). While I am grateful that you put your money where your mouth is and remember to seek out information before forming an opinion, it is still necessary to discuss how suspicion and denigration of trans folk, especially trans women, is baked into the common understandings of gender itself, and that all of us (even me) may not be able to reach into the corners of our mind to root it out.

Let’s start with an example from a fellow critic of my favourite punching bag: The Roman Catholic Church. There are no shortage of odious reasons to dislike the Catholic institution: They exploit their publicly funded organizations to proselytize to vulnerable people; they lobby for religious exemptions from secular law so they can continue endangering and abusing women and queer folk; they are openly and unabashedly patriarchal and put an alarming amount of effort into conditioning their congregation to accept and propagate this; they shield the perpetrators of child sexual assault; they compare gender variance to nuclear weapons; they guilt-trip their congregation into financing these human rights abuses; and they make sure their church bells are obnoxiously fucking loud.

I could go on, but the point is that there are a few criticisms floating around where the most cutting criticism an atheist can muster against the Church is that its figurehead wears a “dress.” I think that reflects a very interesting system of values where all those other egregious crimes against humanity are somehow unworthy of mention. From a Humanist perspective, “patriarch” is an insult–or at least it ought to be. You needn’t bring in a morally neutral activity such as crossdressing to suggest the Pope is worthy of condemnation. I think you can reach a little higher for better fruit than that.

So it manifests among otherwise well-meaning atheists who are generally in favour of QUILTBAG rights & affirmation yet haven’t made the connection between mocking people like Trump because of statues depicting him as fat and ostensibly intersex; and how this message simultaneously denigrates fat & intersex people. As with the Pope, it’s not like there’s a shortage of reasons to really rag on Trump here.

Having written about these issues for a long time I won’t suggest we reduce our coverage trying to understand the impact of deliberate, willful trans-antagonism. I am all too happy to render individual Catholics uncomfortable when I suggest their institution advocates for my psychiatric abuse and that they are complicit in this. And the damage Catholic lobbyists have done to human rights issues is undeniable across the globe.

But supporting a community as embattled as the trans community means understanding that a broader body of accidental, unintentional bias still contributes to our difficulties, and in that respect I need myself and anyone who calls themselves a trans ally to not write ourselves off when we talk about trans-antagonism. That means when I say stuff like “cis het people do this,” don’t walk out of the room and count yourself out because you’re “one of the good ones.” It’s quite likely that you have and will do ‘this,’ even if by accident.

It’s okay, the same is true for me. I just hope we all have the patience and maturity to sit ourselves down and learn from it. What we don’t need is for you to tell us what a great ally you are, we need you to show us by contributing to the accountability of those advancing trans-antagonistic positions, even if unintentionally. Which includes yourself.

 

-Shiv

Breaking news: 9 out of 10 Canadians plan to spend American election day rocking back and forth

In a BREAKING exclusive from The Beaverton, we have received completely totally accurate data on Canadians’ plans for election day!

OTTAWA – A recent survey has revealed that 9 out of every 10 Canadians will spend the entirety of November 8 experiencing a moderate to severe panic attack, manifesting itself in curling into a ball and mumbling ‘this isn’t happening’ over and over again.

“In 2012 I got together with some friends and we had a lot of fun live tweeting Obama’s re-election,” said Shanique Balewa of Winnipeg. “But this year I think I’m just going to sit in a dark room with trembling hands as I constantly refresh CNN on my phone.”

“That or just take a bunch of ambien and hope my nightmares are not as bad as the real world nightmare we may be about to experience,” she added.

From coast to coast, millions of Canadians advised of similar “rocking/moaning” plans. There were variations – some planned to constantly call friends and repeatedly ask, “Trump can’t possibly win right?”, while others intended to never say the name, relying on the Macbeth/Voldemort principal. Still the central activity of holding yourself close to prevent thinking about the horrible, shockingly likely, possibility remained a constant.

“Huhhh, ohhhhh, huhhh, ohhhhh, ohhhh man, oh no, no, no, no, no, no, please no. Tell me this isn’t happening,” said Simon Donahue of Fredericton as he entered into his fifth straight hour of shaking.

The nation’s therapists have reported efforts to calm Canadian’s election , though many note that upon discussing the source of patients’ fears, the mental health professionals joined the 90% and commenced panicking.

Reached for comment, Prime Minister Trudeau admitted to Canadians that, like most of them, he also plans to spend “freaking the eff out”. Sources in the PMO say this stems not only from fears of actually having to work with a the former reality TV host, but frustration over how a Trump Presidency would derail the PM’s plans to break the internet again by posting a “#feminist selfie” with Hillary.

The survey also revealed that the remaining 10% of Canadians were offering to e-mail in some YouTube videos that showed Hillary was just as bad.

Thanks for this BREAKING NEWS, Beaverton.

[I laughed in a “haha too real” kind of way. In case it wasn’t obvious: The Beaverton is a satire site]

-Shiv

French Roman Catholics still beating a dead horse

We know that thanks to terrorist efforts, nationalist and fascist groups across the West are gaining momentum. We also know from history that nationalists have a tendency to draw arbitrary lines about what makes one a “true” countryman, and that the QUILTBAG community is always outside those lines. In fact the effect is so predictable that I debated investing stock in the baseball bat business, because we all know nationalists just love to beat dead horses.

So it can’t be a coincidence that French Roman Catholics are sensing a resurgency in homo-antagonism and so organized an anti gay-marriage rally despite the fact that the law passed three years ago.

Thousands of opponents of gay marriage took to the streets of Paris on Sunday to defend their vision of family values, hoping to revive the issue in political debates ahead of next year’s presidential election.

About 24,000 people took part in the demonstration, police said, far fewer than the several hundreds of thousands the group “Demo for All” mobilized in 2012 and 2013 in an unexpectedly strong show of opposition from conservatives, especially Roman Catholics.

The Socialist government legalized same-sex marriage, which it called “Marriage for All”, in 2013.

Police said 13 people were arrested after a scuffle at the protest, including six topless women from the activist group Femen. Some of them had words “Hate is not a family value” scrawled on their chests.

Organizers of Sunday’s protest aim to pressure politicians on the right, who face a presidential primary next month, to agree to repeal the law if they are elected president.

The protesters marched through prosperous western sections of Paris, waving French flags and the “Demo for All” movement’s blue and pink colors. Some held signs declaring “All together for the family” and “In 2017, I’ll vote for the family.”

Again, they seldom bother to explain how not shitting on Queer people somehow constitutes an assault on the family. Meanwhile QUILTBAG people wanting to, you know, start a family, still can’t thanks to the abusive Catholic lobby.

Let’s say I really like turkey sandwiches, so I go to a sub store to get a turkey sandwich. What the anti-gay lobbyists are doing is essentially shouting from the spot behind me in line that I shouldn’t be allowed to have a turkey sandwich because they prefer ham sandwiches. That the ham is still there for them to purchase seems to escape them.

I will never understand the rationale for this so-called “family values” rhetoric because they obviously are operating from a very twisted idea of what family is.

Needless to say, fuck off Christofascists. Those of us privy to history know better than to view you as anything but a menace.

-Shiv

Triggering Canadian Nationalists

Content Notice: Defacing the flag, I guess?

Let it never be said that sensitivity and the need for safe spaces is in any way monopolized by minorities or liberals. As it turns out, all you need to do to ‘offend’ a certain brand of Canadian Nationalists is add some colour to a piece of fucking fabric:

TRIGGERED

I got a rape threat on my Facebook for sharing this. Facebook says said threat “isn’t a community standards violation.”

According to internet trash basket Life Site News, this ‘distortion’ of the Canadian flag ‘disturbed’ the head of the Christian Heritage Party.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau appeared at the Toronto Gay Pride Parade waving a Canadian flag with the vertical red bars replaced by the rainbow stripes of the LGBTQ movement.

“It’s disturbing to see the flag put to such a use,” Rod Taylor, head of the Christian Heritage Party, told LifeSiteNews. “He is showing disrespect for all the Canadians who disagree with him on the gay agenda. He is basically saying, ‘This is the new Canada, so get used to it.’”

Yes, Rod Taylor, that is the message. You can’t institutionalize second class status for (cis) queer citizens. Boo hoo. I’d drink your tears but I think my doctor would advise against it–that much salt is bad for my health.

Life Site News goes on to correctly point out:

Another site, Findlaw.ca, goes further, stating “the Canadian flag may be a symbol of pride, unity, honour, and sacrifice, but it’s not against the law to disrespect, deface, and destroy it.” In fact, “there are no laws against desecration, such as burning, shredding, stomping, or spitting on it. However objectionable, such acts are protected forms of expression under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.”

Yes, this is the part that reactionaries always forget about their so-called freeze peach: Actual freedom of speech protects citizens criticizing the state, and that criticism can include ‘defacing’ the flag, if we were even to accept that this qualifies as defacing. But perhaps nationalists are too busy arbitrarily drawing lines on “true” Canadians to remember that. They’ll romantically say shit like “people died for that flag!” and then promptly ignore the part where the war the soldier died in was ostensibly to protect our freedoms.

Freedoms like defacing the flag.

-Shiv

Words matter: Trans woman murdered after father calls for her death on TV

Content Notice: transmisogynistic murder, misgendering

I want to show this to the “sticks and stones” crowd, the free speech absolutists whose whining about pushback to denigrating trans people remains blissfully unaware of the violence we actually face because of trans-antagonistic attitudes.

A Russian woman was brutally hacked to death mere days after her wedding after her father called for her death on TV because she is transgender:

A transgender Muslim woman in Russia was hacked to death only days after marrying the man of her dreams.

Raina Aliev’s own own father had gone on television publicly called for her murder.

‘Bring him here and kill him in front of my eyes,’ Alimshaikh Aliev had told a local TV station.

‘Let him be killed, I don’t want to see him. Bring him here and kill him in front of my eyes.’

Aliev, 25, had gender confirmation surgery in Moscow and married a man named Viktor, according to the Daily Mail.

The victim had informed law enforcement authorities about the threat but to no avail.

The circumstances of her murder and where the killing took place have not been revealed. But it is known that the body was cut up and unrecognizable.

It’s the deadliest year on record to be transgender, with every country that tracks demographic-specific hate crime reporting massive spikes in anti-queer and anti-trans violent crime.

And all you can get cis folk to talk about is fuck mothering pronouns.

-Shiv

Snark of the Month: October

We can’t have nice things because of assholes. That’s why the comments are subject to such a rigorous editorial control, but the downside is that people don’t like seeing their comments constantly put in moderation. I know it’s frustrating! But otherwise the comments would derail very quickly. To incentivize your participation despite the annoyance of constant moderation, we have monthly celebrations for snarky contributions!

 

Snark of the Month: Johnny Vector

In a post where McCrory discusses the social impact on himself of introducing HB2, in which he compares people exercising their right of association to disassociate with an odious bigot to the disappearing act of intelligence operatives in 1984, Vector replies:

Man, I still remember physically shaking after that scene in the 1984 film of 1984 where Winston gets disinvited from a charity event.

Word, Johnny.

Runner up: Giliell, professional cynic -Ilk-

Giliell characterizes the fretful Dr. Peterson and his supporters perfectly:

Suggestion: Just go “lalalalalala”. Though even that will lead people to certain conclusions about you. We get it: You want to say whatever you want without anybody ever being allowed to criticise you, to point out the harm you’re causing, without anybody ever making the conclusion that you are, indeed, a bigot and an asshole and subsequently, oh the horrors, no longer invite you to their parties.
Fucking language, how does it work?

I don’t know Giliell, this is the same guy who used the singular they/their in a rant about how they/their wasn’t “grammatically correct.”

Snark on lovelies!

-Shiv

 

 

At least one trans-antagonistic lawsuit loses

With the largely patchwork approach to trans rights, we’re starting to see the United States split in twain along the exact same fault lines it does for every single other social issue.

Illinois is one of the many states in which a lawsuit was filed alleging that a trans girl’s existence constitutes a privacy violation (I’m not even exaggerating–that’s the argument) and thankfully, this lawsuit has suffered its first blow.

Throughout the recommendation, Gilbert laid out in detail why these students are not harmed by sharing a space with a transgender classmate. Indeed, they are not even required to share a space with her, as there are alternative restrooms that they may use. If they’re uncomfortable, they can voluntarily use a different facility or make use of a privacy stall withoutforcing transgender students to be ostracized to other spaces.

Though the plaintiffs — who insistently misgendered Student A throughout their briefs — would disagree, Gilbert agreed that “a transgender person’s gender identity is an important factor to be considered in determining whether his or her needs, as well as those of cisgender people, can be accommodated in the course of allocating or regulating the use of restrooms and locker rooms. So, to frame the constitutional question in the sense of sex assigned at birth while ignoring gender identity frames it too narrowly for the constitutional analysis.”

The student plaintiffs’ claim that a transgender student would violate their sense of privacy and safety was not convincing. “There is absolutely no evidence in this record that allowing transgender high school students to use restrooms or locker rooms consistent with their gender identity increases the risk of sexual assault,” Gilbert pointed out in a footnote. He also highlighted that the military now “allows transgender personnel to serve openly and fully integrated in all military services” and the NCAA “includes transgender student-athletes in collegiate sports consistent with their gender identity.”

“Neither the Restroom Policy nor the Locker Room Agreement shocks the conscience,” he wrote. Given the accommodations available, “put simply, this case does not involve any forced or involuntary exposure of a student’s body to or by a transgender person assigned a different sex at birth.”

What is refreshing to see is a legal professional actually using the same terms recommended by gender affirmative healthcare models. That makes it rather clear what the trans-antagonistic demands actually are: Stop existing.

-Shiv